What are OERs?

"Open Education Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials freely available for everyone to use, whether you are a teacher or a learner. This includes full courses, modules, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, quizzes, lab activities, pedagogical materials, games, simulations, and many more resources contained in digital media collections from around the world. The creation and use of OER represents a shift in education that supports shared teacher expertise and peer-based learning. Free and open content is not only a new economic model for schools and students, but also a primary vehicle for disseminating flexible, adaptable curricula that support learner-centric approaches. " (http://www.oercommons.org/learn-about-the-movement)OERs most often using the Creative Commons licensing to protect their intellectual property. Creative Commons licenses educational materials in a way that gives users the legal permission to

Although not everyone uses the Creative Commons to license their materials, this resource allows content authors six levels of licensing that range from restrictive to very flexible use of their work. While helping to protect the author's intellectual property, at the heart of it is the concept of making educational material freely available to educators worldwide.

Who makes OERs and where can you find them?

Open Education Resources can be made by anyone. This website is an example of an open education resource, where I am freely sharing information and resources I've learned about. Searching online through Google or Bing will lead to you many examples of OERs. And using Google's advanced search will help you narrow down results. Let me share several of these resources with you.

Services like CK-12 make it easy for teachers to assemble their own textbooks. Content is mapped to a variety of levels and standards including common core. You can start from scratch or build from anything from the FlexBooks library.

​"OER Commons is an organization that provides a variety of services related to OERs. They are one of the most active curators of OER on the Internet. They offer a searchable collection of materials for many content areas. Beyond providing access, they offer you the ability to create an account. With the account you can organize and edit existing resources. They also provide training on creating your own OERs and they are one of the leaders in creating development tools for OERs that can help standardize format and make the materials easier to edit, share and manage." (Dr. Marshall Jones)

TED-Ed’s commitment to creating lessons worth sharing is an extension of TED’s mission of spreading great ideas. Within the growing TED-Ed video library, you will find carefully curated educational videos, many of which represent collaborations between talented educators and animators nominated through the TED-Ed platform. This platform also allows users to take any useful educational video, not just TED's, and easily create a customized lesson around the video. Users can distribute the lessons, publicly or privately, and track their impact on the world, a class, or an individual student.

For those with Apple iOS devices, such as iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touch, the iTunes U app provides a way for teachers and students to download K-12 and higher education content - such as video, audio, and PDF files. Most of these resources are free. The iTunes U Course Manager allows an instructor to create and upload content. From the iTunes U app, students can play video or audio lectures and take notes that are synchronized with the lecture. They can read books and view presentations. They can see a list of all the assignments for the course and check them off as they’re completed. And when you send a message or create a new assignment, students receive a push notification with the new information. You can learn more at the Apple iTunes U support site. At left is a picture of some of the iTunes U content available in the App Store.

​"Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. They're a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.

All of the site's resources are available to anyone. It doesn't matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology. Khan Academy's materials and resources are available to you completely free of charge." (https://www.khanacademy.org/about)

At Khan academy, you'll find several thousand videos covering content in math, science, economics, computer science, and humanities. Students have access to a complete custom self-paced learning tool, a dynamic system for getting help, and to custom profile, points, and badges to measure progress. Teachers have tools at hand that allow them to see any of their students in detail, to get real-time class reports for all students, and have access to better intelligence for doing targeted interventions.

One other helpful resource for Khan Academy materials, particularly for those areas that have limited or no access to the internet, is a site called Khan Academy on a Stick. Here you can download an offline version of the Khan Academy videos to use where no Internet access is available. This offline and compact Khan Academy solution includes almost 2,000 selected Khan Academy video lectures on Math and Science, beautifully organized from the ground up in a very user-friendly format, which can be used also as a local server, having its content played by students not just from modern HTML5 browsers on personal computers but also from mobile devices like iPads, iPhones and Android devices. Now available as well a Spanish version, KA-Stick en Español, including more than 800 selected Khan Academy video lectures in Spanish on Math and Science. You can access Khan Academy on a Stick at http://khan.mujica.org/

"Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. They're a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.

All of the site's resources are available to anyone. It doesn't matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology. Khan Academy's materials and resources are available to you completely free of charge." (https://www.khanacademy.org/about)

At Khan academy, you'll find several thousand videos covering content in math, science, economics, computer science, and humanities. Students have access to a complete custom self-paced learning tool, a dynamic system for getting help, and to custom profile, points, and badges to measure progress. Teachers have tools at hand that allow them to see any of their students in detail, to get real-time class reports for all students, and have access to better intelligence for doing targeted interventions.

One other helpful resource for Khan Academy materials, particularly for those areas that have limited or no access to the internet, is a site called Khan Academy on a Stick. Here you can download an offline version of the Khan Academy videos to use where no Internet access is available. This offline and compact Khan Academy solution includes almost 2,000 selected Khan Academy video lectures on Math and Science, beautifully organized from the ground up in a very user-friendly format, which can be used also as a local server, having its content played by students not just from modern HTML5 browsers on personal computers but also from mobile devices like iPads, iPhones and Android devices. Now available as well a Spanish version, KA-Stick en Español, including more than 800 selected Khan Academy video lectures in Spanish on Math and Science. You can access Khan Academy on a Stick at http://khan.mujica.org/

As NASA explores frontiers of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), it seeks to assist teachers and students to explore them as well. NASA also encourages youth to explore STEM careers. STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Through its dissemination network, NASA provides educational materials, information, services, and other resources to our nation's classrooms, and to the world.

Available online, there are teachers' activity guides (thousands of pages of hands-on, inquiry-based activities that focus on STEM), interactive educational websites, print materials in PDF format, and much more. The NASA portal, pictured at left, is the best way to access all these resources. There are sections specifically for educators and for students. One helpful item for educators is the "Find Teaching Materials" link in the educator section. It allows teachers to look for materials based on grade level, subject, and type.

"An OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a free and open digital publication of high quality college and university‐level educational materials. These materials are organized as courses, and often include course planning materials and evaluation tools as well as thematic content. OpenCourseWare are free and openly licensed, accessible to anyone, anytime via the internet."

The OpenCourseWareConsortium is a worldwide community of hundreds of higher education institutions and associated organizations committed to advancing OpenCourseWare and its impact on global education. They serve as a resource for starting and sustaining OCW projects, as a coordinating body for the movement on a global scale, and as a forum for exchange of ideas and future planning.

Empowering MindsThrough OCW, educators improve courses and curricula, making their schools more effective; students find additional resources to help them succeed; and independent learners enrich their lives and use the content to tackle some of our world’s most difficult challenges, including sustainable development, climate change, and cancer eradication.

"Tufts OpenCourseWare is part of a new educational movement initiated by MIT that provides free access to course content for everyone online. Tufts' course offerings demonstrate the University's strength in the life sciences in addition to its multidisciplinary approach, international perspective and underlying ethic of service to its local, national and international communities.

​OpenStax Connexions is: a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute:

authors create and collaborate

instructors rapidly build and share custom collections

learners find and explore content

OpenStax believes that everyone has something to learn, and everyone has something to teach.Frustrated by the limitations of traditional textbooks and courses, Dr. Richard Baraniuk founded OpenStax (then Connexions) in 1999 at Rice University to provide authors and learners with an open space where they can share and freely adapt educational materials such as courses, books, and reports. ​​Today, OpenStax CNX is a dynamic non-profit digital ecosystem serving millions of users per month in the delivery of educational content to improve learning outcomes.

​There are tens of thousands of learning objects, called pages, that are organized into thousands of textbook-style books in a host of disciplines, all easily accessible online and downloadable to almost any device, anywhere, anytime.

​YouTube is the largest video sharing website there is, and includes a vast wealth of educational material. Founded in February 2005, YouTube allows billions of people to discover, watch and share originally-created videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small.

YouTube EDU brings learners and educators together in a global video classroom. On YouTube EDU, you have access to a broad set of educational videos that range from academic lectures to inspirational speeches and everything in between. Come here for quick lessons from top teachers around the world, course lectures from top-tier universities, or inspiring videos to spark your imagination.

You can help build a global classroom on YouTube EDU by creating educational videos then uploading them to your YouTube channel. Nominate a channel to be added to YouTube EDU through this form.

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections, and provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.

MERLOT is a free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty, staff and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy. MERLOT is a leading edge, user-centered, collection of peer reviewed higher education, online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services.

MERLOT's strategic goal is to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning by increasing the quantity and quality of peer reviewed online learning materials that can be easily incorporated into faculty designed courses.

SlideShare is the world's largest community for sharing presentations. With 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million page views, it is amongst the most visited 200 websites in the world. Besides presentations, SlideShare also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars.